Wondering how...

Hello all!  It's Alison here, back with a step-by-step of how the background to my recent Think and Wonder tag was created.  There have been several questions about it, so I thought I'd spill the beans!  (If you want to see more of the whole tag, you'll find it here.)

The background uses a technique I fell over by accident.  I made a tag - Wonderful Journey - which was basically the result of Gelli printing leftovers.  After one printing, I laid down the reverse of the stencil I'd been using onto a tag so that I got a nice painty print.  Then I inked over it, and absolutely loved the result!

This time around, I thought I would just eliminate the "middle-man", and go straight to getting the stencil all painty, so I got out one of the Crafter's Workshop 6x6-ers and set to work.  Of course, when stencils are involved, there will always be a "reverse" leftover, so I taped it to a decent piece of paper - knowing I'd have another background-starter once I was done.

I used Distress Paints - Peeled Paint, Broken China, and Salty Ocean, as far as I remember - and dabbed them over the stencil.  Since the DPs are water-reactive, a little spritz of paint started them blending right there on the stencil.  It's the stencil I'm concentrating on, so the image beneath is more roughly covered than you might otherwise go for.  (Round the edge you can see where I've "cleaned" my Broken China after it got a bit Peeled Paint-y.)

Once I had full coverage, I flipped the stencil over onto my waiting tag and pressed down gently. Even though I used a jumbo tag, it was both longer and narrower than my painty stencil, so I was able to rotate the stencil and use the "unpressed" part to cover the top part of the tag.

And rather than waste anything on the craft mat, I made sure my blank piece of paper was lined up next to the tag to catch any spare paint.

You can either let that dry, or help it along with a heat tool, and there you've got your opaque, resistant, painty surface.

Next step is to add some of the translucent inks to this opaque patterning.  I used a blending tool to ink co-ordinating colours of Distress Inks over the surface of the tag.  The inks grab on to the spaces in between the paint, glowing with translucent colour next to the opacity of the resisting paint.

And the next step is sort of the real magic for me... simple spritz and flick technique à la Tim Holtz.  Because the paints, once dry, are completely fast, they don't respond to the water droplets, but the inks do... so you get a wonderful extra texture within your pattern.

The whole point of this blue-green extravaganza was to provide a counterpoint to the vivid oranges and pinks of the smaller tag... but I loved the results so much that it was hard to cover it up... I suspect you'll find similar creations turning up in my craftwork pretty soon!

Thanks so much for stopping by today, and don't forget our new challenge to use Gel Medium has just started.  Come and play right here.

Happy Crafting!
Alison xx

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